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Hillary Clinton and Ghazala Khan have us talking about motherhood this U.S. presidential election: Timson

Being a mother doesn’t make a woman a better candidate, but why shouldn’t America elect someone who knows what it’s like to give birth?

In this July 1992, Hillary Clinton waits in a New York hotel room with her mother, Dorothy Rodham, and her father, Hugh E. Rodham during the Democratic National Convention. (Ron Frehm / The Associated Press)

“…without saying a thing, all the world, all America felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart," Ghazala Khan wrote in an op-ed after Republican nominee Donald Trump criticized her for not speaking at the Democratic National Convention.
(J. Scott Applewhite / The Associated Press)

Wed., Aug. 3, 2016

Motherhood. It’s as American as apple pie, as the old saying goes. Or at least mother worship is. Research shows that most of us, no matter what our age, think of our mothers at least once a day.

How fascinating then, to see the outsized role the concept of “mother” has played so far in both the American presidential election campaign, and last month, in Britain’s Conservative leadership contest.

Hillary Clinton, the first female Democratic presidential candidate in history, proudly invoked her motherhood — and her own late mother — during her jubilant acceptance speech at the convention last week: “Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come.”

That line made me cry — with joy that such a moment had come for all women and with a tinge of sorrow that my late mother, an American Democrat, had not lived to see it.

My mother was a political junkie before the word was invented, and by her side as a child I watched many American political conventions. She particularly loved the roll call (“The great state of Alabama casts its votes for…”) In honour of her, for two hours, I watched all 50 states and several territories declare their votes to make history. This one’s for you, Mom.

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Clinton of course was not the only mother making waves at the Democratic convention. Ghazala Khan, a “Gold Star” mother whose son Capt. Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq in 2004, took the stage and stood silently alongside her lawyer husband Khizr as, waving his pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution, he delivered a now famous scorching rebuke to Republican nominee Donald Trump, calling him out for his bigotry and ignorance, and telling him “you have sacrificed nothing.”

Thin-skinned, bigoted and pathologically insensitive, Trump crossed every line known to human decency — and may have seriously damaged his campaign — by callously suggesting in interviews that Ghazala Khan had been forced to remain silent because she’s a Muslim woman. Khan emotionally replied in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that her grief had kept her silent: “…without saying a thing, all the world, all America felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart.”

The political repercussions of this dispiriting saga are still unfolding. But if Donald Trump can’t grasp that you don’t insult the grieving mother of a dead American soldier, then he is indeed one dangerous dunce.

Over in Britain, Theresa May handily won the Tory leadership after David Cameron’s Brexit mess, partly because her chief rival, energy minister Andrea Leadsom, suggested that because she had children, and May had none, she had more of a stake in Britain’s future.

Leadsom’s remarks were called “vile,” “disgusting,” “wrong” and “insulting.” “Being a parent doesn’t qualify you to be PM”, tweeted one MP. Out she went. Apparently she didn’t have the votes anyway.

Still, I thought the reaction was way over the top. Candidates give lots of spurious reasons why they would make better leaders and Leadsom’s was easy to counter by simply declaring one’s humanity and not one’s outrage.

On the U.S. Democratic stage, the invoking by a potential female president of her mother and what she gave and taught her was a powerful one.

Clinton’s mother Dorothy Rodham had a very hard early life. As Clinton told the convention “My mother, Dorothy, was abandoned by her parents as a young girl. She ended up on her own at 14, working as a housemaid. She was saved by the kindness of others. Her first grade teacher saw she had nothing to eat at lunch and brought extra food to share.”

Clinton emphasized: “The lesson she passed on to me years later stuck with me. No one gets through life alone. We have to look out for each other and lift each other up.”

You could say this was a clichéd “born in a log cabin” variant used by all presidential contenders to invoke the American Dream and their own humble beginnings.

But because of its historical significance — the first woman in 250 years to become the presidential candidate of a major party (one exultant tweet hailed Hillary’s victory as a “moon landing for women”) the mention of her late mother, who had lived with Clinton in Washington while she was Secretary of State, was legitimately moving.

You did wonder what Dorothy Rodham would have thought if she lived to see this day — and what she thought all along, for that matter, as her only daughter, in good and complicated ways, rose to become the most famous woman in America.

We mothers know a lot. But we are not superior beings if we become mothers. (One key biological moment, and there you are.) The women in my life who did not have children — either by choice or by circumstance — are gloriously capable, strong and generously interested in their friends’ offspring and the future of the planet. I wouldn’t dare separate their leadership capabilities from mine.

But why shouldn’t America elect a President who knows what it’s like not only to sit in the Senate and as Secretary of State, negotiate an international peace treaty, but also to be pregnant, give birth, and basically worry for the rest of your life?

“I sweat the details,” Clinton confessed during her acceptance speech.

She may have been talking policy, but that’s a perfect description of motherhood. Let’s see if it gets her to the White House.

Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson

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